How Singapore got a grip on water scarcity

SINGAPORE: Water has influenced war, the economy, and people’s health in Singapore. How has this water-stressed country become a global pioneer in the management of a scarce resource?

Home to six million people, the city-state of Singapore is colourful, multicultural and prosperous. Ranking among the top five richest countries globally, it is an international centre for the financial industry and global trade.

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It is also clean and green with many parks featuring fountains, ponds, and canals. Yet with no natural freshwater sources of its own, it is one of the most water-stressed states in the world.

Even so, Singapore is successfully meeting the increasing water needs of its rapidly growing population and economy. So much so, that over the past decades, the small island state has managed to become a global role model in water management.

“None of what they’ve done is magic,” said Peter Gleick, hydrologist and founder of the Pacific Institute, a USA based NGO specialised in water.

Instead of hard infrastructure, which extracts ever more water from the natural world, Gleick attributes Singapore’s success to the “soft path” approach.

“The soft path tries to turn that around and say, ‘let’s use water efficiently and carefully. Let’s stop wasting water. Let’s look at new sources of supply.'”

Singapore’s water managment masterplan

Water shortages have a long history in Singapore. Whether through Britain’s colonial rule, allied battles against fascist Japan in the Second World War or during the post-war era, it has experienced frequent floods, poor sanitary conditions and a need for water rationing.

And while its water woes didn’t disappear overnight when it became independent in 1965, what did change was that the country took charge of its own destiny.

“They started planning to be water independent, as well as food independent, energy independent,” said Cecilia Tortajada, Professor of Environmental Innovation at the University of Glasgow, who has extensively worked in and on Singapore.

The government of the day developed a masterplan, which has been fine tuned over the years to create four pillars of water supply dubbed “national taps.” These include imported water, desalination, local catchment and so-called ‘NEWater.’

The four national taps

Singapore found fresh water not far from its own borders in neighboring Malaysia and secured a supply through two agreements in the 1960s.

To this day, millions of liters of river water, around half of Singapore’s total demand, are pumped across the border in pipelines every day. However, Malaysia has threatened to stop deliveries and increase prices, and bilateral tensions have repeatedly erupted, even leading to warnings of military conflict in 2002. Singapore therefore plans to stop importing water by 2061, meaning the other three taps will have to be highly efficient.

“Water planning is very important,” said Jon Marco Church, water management expert at the United Nations. “The objective of this masterplan is to make the most out of every single drop of water.”

Above all, this means keeping the canals and drains clean, investing billions, collecting water, treating it, and using exisiting water, such as the ocean.

Drinking from the ocean?

Today, five desalination plants provide up to 25 per cent of the island’s total water supply. Greened on the surface and designed like parks, these ultra-modern systems are located underground in the center of the city and function as both purification and desalination facilities.

In recent decades, Singapore has played a key role in further developing desalination plant technology. The aim is to increase capacity to meet 30 per cent of the country‘s requirements by 2060. However, this is still a long way from self-sufficiency, so the remaining water has to come from somewhere else.

Collect, collect more and save it

Two-thirds of Singapore’s surface area is used for rainwater storage. Water from roofs is channeled via drains into a network of rivers, canals, and 17 reservoirs, the largest of which is the Marina Barrage.

Covering an area of 10,000 hectares, it not only collects fresh water but the basin and dam also serve as flood defenses. If, in extreme cases, the reservoirs and canals overflow, underground tanks collect the floodwater, which can later be treated to produce drinking water.

The government plans to utilise 90 per cent of the country’s landmass for rainwater catchment by 2060.

Besides infrastructure measures, raising awareness around the need to save water is something Glieck says has been a success.

“They’ve educated their community about their water situation, about their water challenges, and about the solutions that they’ve chosen to push,“ emphasises Gleick.

Water-saving fittings are subsidised and those who install them also receive discounts on other sustainable products. Saving water is therefore worthwhile. And digital water meters in private homes help to detect leaks quickly, making Singapore a leading light in minimising water losses due to problematic pipes.

Sewage Highways and Democratic Deficits

However, the island state is not only considered a master in collecting rainwater but also in water treatment.

“All wastewater is collected, treated, and reused as much as possible,” said Jon Church from UN Water.

At a cost of $10 billion, Singapore has built a 206-kilometer-long underground sewage highway that channels wastewater to state-of-the-art treatment plants.

“Most countries don’t even invest a fraction of what Singapore is investing,” Church added.

Such big investments are partly possible due to Singapore’s prosperity but also due to a political system that favors the implementation of such large-scale projects. The Bertelsmann Transformation Index describes Singapore as a “moderate autocracy.” Freedom of assembly, expression, and association are restricted in Singapore, where the same party has been in power since the state was founded.

Singapore also has a major advantage over other countries in that it has almost no agriculture to consume and pollute water.
The pride and joy of the country’s forward-looking strategy, however, is treatment, or NEWater.

Drinking recycled wastewater?

High-quality water is obtained through microfiltration, reverse osmosis, and UV radiation. Singapore already recycles 30 per cent of its water requirements and plans to increase this proportion to 55 per cent by 2060.

The majority of water harvested this way is used in industry, with only a small proportion made available to drink. Worldwide, only a tiny share of what is flushed down the drain is recycled into drinking water, although the potential is huge and safe technology does exist.

“It’s still controversial because it’s seen as something dirty that we have to get rid of,” said Gleick, adding that the water in Singapore is so clean it is used by the chip industry, which needs ultra-pure water.

California and Namibia’s capital Windhoek are pioneers in the use of household wastewater. In the latter, extreme water shortages mean wastewater has been recycled into drinking water since the 1960s.

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Cecilia Tortajada from the University of Glasgow says when countries in the western start talking about the cost and process of improving water management, the question is often “but can we do it?”

“In Singapore, it’s: how are we are going to do it? So it’s a very different perspective, it’s proactive.”